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Most smartphone OEMs don’t want their phones to be messed around with make their life difficult by repairing a tampered smartphone. And subsequently you lose warranty when you unlock. Thankfully OP doesn’t do that. So, if you are waiting just for your warranty period to lapse, then don’t!

It has a pretty good Screen on Time (SOT). This is a measure of how good the battery performance is. RR gives 4 hours on an average (which is pretty good). The stock ROM had a SOT of less than 3 hours and my previous phone the LG V10 had a SOT of about 1:30 hours (pretty rubbish).

Very stable, which is usually difficult to achieve in a custom ROM. Though many ROMs give you a lot of feature, there will be certain stability issues. I have had for almost 30 days, there is none.

Pie control. It is a very fancy and useful feature to do quick actions (home key, recent, last app, close app) seamlessly from anywhere.

A couple of more useful gestures than what stock provides. For e.g., accessing flashlight from lock screen by drawing ‘V’ wasn’t consistent, but you can just do a single finger upward motion to do it.

Last but not the least, substratum theme. Theoretically, you can change the looks of system UI and also any app to the colour and theme you prefer. Stock offers only dark and white mode. I currently have dark UI with red accents, which to me, is gorgeous.

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I will try to explain the entire process in 4 different steps which can be used individually for other works/process.

1) Unlock

Please be noted that, at the end of these steps all your data will be wiped, please have a backup of the same.

Enable ‘developer options‘ from settings. This is done by clicking ‘Build Number‘ from ‘About Phone‘ in settings a couple of times (7 to 8 times).

After enabling go into the ‘Developer options‘ sub settings and select ‘OEM unlocking’ and ‘USB debugging‘.

Connect your smartphone with the charging cable to your computer. Unzip the downloaded file and using command line(windows) or terminal (linux and mac) navigate to the unzipped folder.

Check if things work until now by issuing command:
Windows:

adb devices

Linux/mac:

./adb devices

Boot to bootloader. Unzip the above downloaded file and using command line(windows) or terminal (linux and mac) navigate to the unzipped folder and issue command:
Windows:

adb reboot bootloader

Linux/mac:

./adb reboot bootloader

In about a minute you would boot to bootloader. From here type:
Windows:

fastboot oem unlock

Linux/mac:

./fastboot oem unlock

And select ‘yes’ when it is prompted on the screen.

Now that we have unlocked the bootloader we are free to install any recovery or firmware/ROM

2) Install Recovery

TWRP is a pretty good recovery which allows basic actions like installing, wiping cache, etc and also has other features like file browser, flashing multiple images, mounting file system among other things. Download the correct (recovery) image file from here and copy the file into the same folder as your adb. Make sure your phone is connected to your computer (see pt. 4 & 5 above). Also notice the command usage above, Linux and mac begin with ‘./‘ before the command, please use the same format even for below commands.

Rename the image to twrp.img and from bootloader (see pt. 6 above) type:

fastboot flash recovery twrp.img

After flashing type this while holding Power and Volume-Down keys to boot to recovery.

fastboot reboot

If for some reason, you are booted into your OS, select either ‘recovery‘ from power menu or shutdown and use the above hardware key combinations to boot into recovery. In very few cases you might want to repeat this “Install Recovery” step alone if the recovery wasn’t installed properly.

3) Download ROM and Gapps

Download the latest RR ROM from here. Usually any custom ROM doesn’t ship with any of the google apps (instead they might have other stock apps). Hence, we need to download gapps from opengapps. From here select ‘Arm64‘, ‘7.1‘(your RR ROM version) and ‘micro‘ (which has all basic google apps). If you try to get too experimental use ‘aroma’. Transfer both the files into a single folder of your smartphone.

4) Install ROM and Gapps

Before this step make sure you make a backup of data (message, logs, app, app-data), but other data like music, images, etc. would be in-tact. Again, boot into recovery and select ‘wipe‘ (Dalvik cache, system, data, cache). Select Install, browse for the ROM file (from where you saved in the above step) and slide to select. After successful RR installation, select flash another file and select Gapps. After the installation completes you are good to reboot.

Past the few mins of the initial boring setup you would be sticking to your OP 3T for quite a few days going around the various customization.